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Saturday, 1 October 2011

Android Ice-Cream Sandwich: Good or Bad?

With the closing heatwave of the summer it's never too late to have an ice-cream . That's why Google is imminently releasing their new os 'Ice-Cream Sandwich' sometime this Autumn. Purportedly the os will work effectively on both tablets and phones. Some of the features include a new app drawer ui and stackable homescreen apps. A faster performance is of course expected and Google is very excited about their new project.
So where's the downside: Well from a user point of view it seems all gravy but what is an issue and has been an issue for Android for a long time is fragmentation.
Fragmentation is happening on two levels: The first is that the os supports many different types of phones with a variety of screen sizes and processing power, amongst other things. What this means is that many phones due to their low processing power have not been able to upgrade to the newer os's , Processing power is not the only concern as some phones ship with an os and the manufacturer neglects to update it when a newer os emerges ( yes, HTC Desire we're talking about you).
So whilst the legendary creamy cool sandwich will assuredly be fantastic developers and phone manufacturers must beware of further fragmentation.
As this article from the Android developers website shows: http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html . The situation is already, well, fragmented!
Then again we must also consider the opportunities present here, for a genius developer whom can come up with a programming solution to this fragmentation there could be a lot of money to be made.
So Ice-cream sandwich get it while its hot, umm,cold!